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Topic: Places becoming less livable (Read 233391 times)

You may take a journey to scandinavia, here you would be able to see similar harbours of the vikings on dry land.Isostatic rebound is a highly complex movement. All places which had a significant ice load will rise, that is fast land today and it is shelf in front of Scotland and norwegian coast for example. So a part of the sea floor will rise too, but deeper down, the sea floor will descend as a reaction to the rising land and shelf.The mantle under depressed crust will move lateral and lift up the sea floor when the crust is loaded, and when it is unloaded the movement will reverse.

Further you have to take local tectonic circumstances into account.Look at the Netherlands and northern Germany. These regions had a significant ice load, but nevertheless are sinking today. This is due to much higher Ice load of Scandinavia and thus much higher isostatic rebound, AND, a reaction to the rise of the alps, tipping the whole plate. So, between to regions of uplift one region reacts with depression, despite it should be lifting too.

As i understand it, isostatic rebound of deglaciated areas will not add significant to sea level rise, because this effect is counteracted by deepening of the communicating areas of oceanic crust.

Here it is very difficult to distinguish between isostatic rebound of the crust and simple ablation of ice. measuring crustal uplift only with help of satelites is very difficult if you do not have fixed GPS stations at place, not on the ice but on rock.

Plinius,

Isostatic rebound is able to rise the crust with several cm/year. Your appraisal of several hundred meters is correct. When you calculate with a general density of ice of round 0,9 Kg/dm3 and rock 2,65 Kg/dm3 you will get an isostatic rebound of around 1000 m, very unaccurate, because of regional differences (and because 2,65 is only valid for upper crust rocks). How long it will take depends on the viscosity of the mantle local underneath the crust.

So sorry, my bookmark only took me to the AGU website.My recollection is that a study from about 2 years ago referenced a earlier study that had found very rapid rebound based on the elevation change in the overburden of ice. IIRC the gave a fairly accurate number for height of rebound vs. height of ice lost, but what that number might have been is lost to me.One or both of the expeditions had involved boreholes down to the rock.

In Newfoundland and Southern Labrador I had been astonished at the number beach lines presently at fairly high elevations. but that was just personal observation.

A human’s core temperature is about 98.6 degrees, but the skin temperature of the trunk is about 4 to 9 degrees colder, depending on how warm it is and how active a person is. But sweating, which helps keep the core body temperature constant, becomes increasingly ineffective in increasingly humid air, and it can never cool the skin to below the wet-bulb temperature.

A person who is physically active at a wet-bulb temperature of 80 degrees will have trouble maintaining a constant core temperature and risks overheating. A sedentary person who is naked and in the shade will run into the same problem at a wet-bulb temperature of 92 degrees. A wet-bulb temperature of 95 degrees is lethal after about six hours.

Climate change will likely denude much of the forested ecosystem that supports Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks by the year 2050, a Jackson-based report says.

Rising temperatures increase the chance of catastrophic wildfire, The Coming Climate says. Instead of recurring once every 100-300 years, wildfires on the scale of those that burned Yellowstone in 1988 will happen only decades apart. By mid-century there will be “a very real chance that coniferous forests will disappear from most areas,” the report says.

Outside of Ethiopia’s larger cities, people relied on wood fires to heat their homes and cook. But after years of forest cutting, the Sahara Desert began extending its reach, which caused crops to fail. This, coupled with a chronic drought that spanned from the 1960s into the 1980s, claimed the livelihoods of thousands of proud, generational farmers.

"We don’t actually know how much is stored in each of these aquifers. Estimates of remaining storage might vary from decades to millennia," said Richey. "In a water-scarce society, we can no longer tolerate this level of uncertainty, especially since groundwater is disappearing so rapidly."

"By Monday morning, one in every 100 Saskatchewanians was fleeing from fire, with as many as 50 communities turned into ghost towns almost overnight. It's the largest single movement of people in the Wheat Province since the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and according to the Red Cross, it's the largest evacuation they're ever seen."

The village of Newtok, Alaska, sits on the shore of the Ninglick River, on increasingly unstable land affected by erosion and melting permafrost. To escape the predicted collapse of the village site, residents will soon have to relocate to more stable ground. Newtok, with a population of approximately of 375 ethnically Yupik people, was founded in 1959, but the Yupik have lived on the coastal lands along the Bering Sea for thousands of years. Today, as global temperatures rise, Newtok and several other remote Alaskan villages are threatened by melting permafrost, widening rivers, coastal erosion, and larger storms that come in from the Bering Sea. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the highest point in Newtok—the school—could be underwater by 2017. A new village site called Mertarvik has been established about nine miles away, though so far families have been slow to relocate. Getty Images photographer Andrew Burton spent several days in Newtok recently, documenting the environment, the new town site, and the Yupik way of life in this threatened remote village. (Also worth reading is this earlier story on The Atlantic: When Global Warming Kills Your God.)

I wouldn't invest in property in any of the areas in red on this map, with the exception of those without easy links to the world's oceans. Especially the Nile delta, as that's also retreating due to lack of silt deposition (thanks to dams on the Nile).

In a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers found that in New England, more people died in years with warmer-than-average summers, while warmer-than-usual winters reduced the numbers of deaths. But warmer winters did not quite offset warmer summers.

"A rise in summer mean temperature of 1 degree C (just under 2 degrees F) was associated with a 1 percent higher death rate, whereas an increase in winter mean temperature corresponded to a 0.6 percent decrease in mortality," Joel Schwartz, a professor of environmental health at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and colleagues wrote.

The wall of permafrost below the lake is expected to collapse sometime this summer or fall, Kokelj says. While no homes or people live in the immediate area – the lake lies in the northern N.W.T., just over 12 miles from Fort McPherson – campers and hikers are being cautioned to avoid it.

Nice work, jai. I find that many intelligent people find the concept of wbt highly unintuitive. The main thing is to make it clear that it's based on 35 C absolute temperature with 100% humidity.

If people reflect a bit that human internal temperature is 37 C, and that the skin has to be cooler than that to regulate internal temperature, it should be clear to anyone with a smidgen of physics that evaporation, the thing that usually cools the skin at absolute temperatures above 35C, just won't work at 100% humidity. And at much higher temperatures, less than 100% humidity is still lethal.

One thing that might be leading people astray also is that it is obviously not instantly lethal to be exposed to those conditions (and worse); otherwise saunas would be death chambers. But you just don't hang out in a sauna longer than a few minutes (at least I don't), and you certainly don't try to do any heavy labor in one!! It takes about six hours for a wbt of 35 to be 'reliably' lethal.

Logged

"A force de chercher de bonnes raisons, on en trouve; on les dit; et après on y tient, non pas tant parce qu'elles sont bonnes que pour ne pas se démentir." Choderlos de Laclos "You struggle to come up with some valid reasons, then cling to them, not because they're good, but just to not back down."

Climate change (via $ of property at risk) made the Miami Herald front page last week.

Ground Zero for climate change

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Yet the report is much more than a mere accountant’s ledger of the costs of climate change. It’s a call to action on the part of the business community, a plea for those who have the most at stake to get involved in the biggest challenge facing this generation and future ones. Mr. Paulson and his colleagues believe that putting the problem in a business perspective should arouse the business community to become more active.......we can't say we weren't warned.

With climate change set to force millions of people from their homes due to more frequent extreme weather events and rising sea levels, one academic has been travelling the world to see how the people facing relocation feel. ‘There’s just no place like home,’ says University of New South Wales lecturer Johannes Luetz. ‘People want to stay where they are,’ he explains, citing work in the Maldives to artificially raise islands. For others, forward planning and community education are just as important as addressing the ‘protection gaps’ prevalent at the international level

Creating a database of historic places, to aid in recovery efforts after the next disaster.

Mississippi Preserves its History after Hurricane Katrina

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Using GPS data, FEMA’s Environmental Planning and Historic Preservation program surveyed historic districts, properties and archaeological sites in the lower Mississippi counties most affected by Katrina and created a database that will help emergency management officials in future disasters. They also updated listings for the National Register of Historic Places, and found 58 archaeological sites that had not previously been identified.

The immediate aim is to guard against 100-year-storms, or those that have a 1 percent chance of hitting in any given year, through the year 2057. Many observers argued for a tougher 200- or even 500-year-storm standard, but that would have cost billions of dollars more to raise levees even higher.

Instead, the goal is to modify the system as needed. This "adaptive management" will keep engineers busy, since the forecast is for worsening conditions: rising sea levels, a New Orleans that continues to sink as groundwater is pumped from beneath it, and coastal wetlands being destroyed faster than they can be restored.

"It's going to get more and more challenging, and there will be a time when you can't build the walls high enough," Link said.

El Niño, who was supposed to fend off these damn hurricanes this season, has abandoned me — all right, all right, not just me — to languish within the dreaded Cone of Doom.

So here I am, sputtering at the computer screen like a mad man, cursing a forecast track that propels Erika across the Leeward Islands to my very vicinity, as if the damn thing was hooked up to a GPS homing device.

Here, then, are a few scenarios for a climate-altered future, when rising temperatures are closing in on the threshold of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels which scientists warn we should not cross.

Schools Get a First-Hand Lesson in Climate Change, at Their Students’ ExpenseFinancially strapped school systems and their aging infrastructure are ill-equipped to adapt to more extreme weather like heat, floods and wildfires.

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...Newton stayed open through the heat wave, but dozens of school districts across the country canceled classes or shortened their days because of heat, wildfires or flooding in the last two weeks. It is a glimpse of the challenge that climate change will pose—and in some cases is already posing—to the American educational system.

Heat was the culprit in closings in New England, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and South Dakota. Districts in California, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest cancelled classes in late August because of encroaching wildfires. A number of Phoenix schools closed last month because a monsoon-like rain caused flooding and power outages.

"Safety, security and comfort are necessities in order to facilitate learning," said Jason Lembke an architect at the Washington, D.C.-based design firm DLR Group who specializes in designing K-12 schools. "Climate change puts all of these at risk."

One of the most pressing concerns, education experts said, is how the country's rapidly aging school infrastructure, two-thirds of which was built in the early to mid 20th century, will stand up to more intense storms, hotter days, floods and escalating wildfires....In Monroe County in South Florida, 65 percent of schools sit on land that would be flooded if sea level rises just one foot. Many others in the state sit just two or three feet above sea level....Scientists estimate that temperatures in New York City could increase by as much as 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s, with the number of days above 90 degrees jumping from 18 today to 76 by that decade. Roughly one-third of schools in the city currently don't have air conditioning. In Boston, only 30 of the city's 126 public schools are air-conditioned.

"When heat gets bad there is no question that kids don't function too well," said Adam Sobel, director and chief scientist of Columbia University's Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. "There are intrinsic physiological limits beyond which people simply can't do much, and more of the world is going to be reaching those more often."..."We typically average three to five days for snow days each year," Scarice said. "But the last few years that's doubled, with eight or nine cancelled days. The temperatures this week were just too dangerous for our young students."

I am reminded of the graphic photo I saw in Sequoia National Park of a car, trashed by a bear, that had nothing more than a gum wrapper inside. As natural food becomes more scarce and bears expand their territory into human habitat, scenes like this will only increase.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (WSVN) -- As night falls in South Florida, people living near Northeast 14th Street and Bayview Drive in Fort Lauderdale are dealing some strange tides due to Sunday's Supermoon.

Water run off has been going into the street and homes that back up in to the Intracoastal Waterway are dealing with water in their backyards as well.

Resident Carol O'Brien has lived in the area for several years and told 7News that the water has become a nuisance this time of year. "The last three years, it has gotten progressively worse," she said.

With the heavy rainfall she said, "The parking lots are not usable and people have kind of scrambled around. Fortunately it's off season, so a lot of our owners aren't here."

Much of the flooding can be blamed on the arrival of the Supermoon. In the days before, there are higher than normal tides because the moon is closer to earth, but the Fort Lauderdale residents in this area know to prepare.

One resident was seen moving his car before the parking lot floods out, after he lost a car a few years back in the mess.

Another neighbor put her car on risers to keep it from getting damaged. Others say, they make the best of it. "You can't get in without taking your shoes off," she said. "I have swimming shoes that I wear, I do."

Drivers Sunday are advised to be careful in the early morning and early evening for water run off in lower lying areas.

Scientists say New York City already faces much worse flood risks due to rising seas

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In a new study, scientists say that the risk of major hurricane or storm-driven flooding in New York City is already considerably higher than it was 1,000 or even 100 years ago, thanks both to a considerable rise in sea level, but also, they say, to changes in the nature of storms....The bulk of the increasing risk is a simple result of rising seas. If they’re higher, then storm surges can attain greater absolute heights and travel farther inland. But there’s also a question of whether something about the characteristics of storms has also changed — bigger or more powerful storms can also fling greater storm surges.

To determine this, the researchers subtracted back out the role of changing sea levels and simply examined the surges generated by the storms. Here, there was not an average difference in storm surge heights across the two eras, but in statistics-speak, there was a “long tail” phenomenon, in which the very rare extreme storms appeared to be getting worse. “The storm surge heights in the tails of the anthropogenic distributions are significantly greater than the storm surge heights in the tails of the pre-anthropogenic storm surge distributions,” the paper concluded.

The study also found that very, very large storms that aren’t so intense in terms of sheer wind speed, but nevertheless drive very large surges, were also more likely in the current era. Storms like Sandy, that is.

“I think the punchline is, we made Sandy much more likely already,” says Mann. “We’re already dealing with greatly elevated risk. We’re not just talking about the future. Climate change is already costing us dearly, but it’ll be a whole lot worse if we do nothing about it.”

A combination of climate-driven sea level rise and stronger tropical cyclones is putting New York City at risk for more and higher floods like those seen during Hurricane Sandy, a group of researchers has found.

In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers compared sea level and storm surge heights from 850 to 1800, before significant human influences on the climate, to the period from 1970 to 2005.

The average flood height increased by about 4 feet in New York between the two time periods and with continued warming, larger and more extreme storms along with even higher sea level is likely to cause more frequent and intense flooding....The chance of another storm like Sandy, with a 9-foot storm surge, is now about once every 130 years, compared to once every 3,000 years in the pre-anthropogenic era, Reed said.